Painted Pivka is a multi-year project (2022–2025) of the Hiša kulture in Pivka gallery, which examines wall painting, its expression, scope and significance in the public space, using the example of a small town like Pivka.

As known, the central significance of mural painting is that it brings art into the public space. In this way, the artwork reaches the widest possible audience, including visitors that never venture into a gallery, and at the same time can become an effective medium of social communication. As there were no public murals in Pivka before the project, it seems particularly suitable to explore what impact painting can have on the town's inhabitants, the relationships between them and the social atmosphere in general. Hiša kulture therefore sees the project as a kind of laboratory for exploring the relationship between art and society, and at the same time hopes that it will make an important contribution to the development of the town's visual image and the promotion of visual art in general.

In the first implementation of the project in 2022, painter Leon Zuodar created a painting entitled Artist at Work in the courtyard behind Hiša kulture, which thematises the work of the artist, their contribution to the development of society and society's perception of contemporary art.

This year, the painter and illustrator Petra Preželj painted a mural on the supporting wall of Vrtec Mavrica. The artist conceived the mural in her characteristic style, which is defined on the one hand by a strict drawing full of meticulously worked-out details and on the other hand by an exuberant spectrum of colour. A loquacious, meaningful expression emerges from this tension. The painting shows figures of animals, plants, people and fantastic creatures arranged on a colourful background on which abstract patterns of lines and dots alternate with recognisable landscape elements (road, hill, cloud). The interplay of different motifs that merge into one another and pictorial elements that represent different things in the same way – for instance, a pattern of dots/dashes on a dark blue background, for example, could be fur, a cloud or a patch of snow – creates ambiguity and ambivalence that allows for different interpretations; the events in the painting can be interpreted in their own way and used to imagine one or more stories, which the artist encourages with the title – Tell a Story.

The project is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Pivka and Pivka Primary School, Kindergarten Unit.